Update: New Year, New Beginnings

Hey folks, this is just a quick post to update you about some plans l have for this site in the New Year. I want to take this blog and other projects like Linux Outlaws on to bigger and better things this year. I should start with a little of back story for anyone who doesn’t know.

I started this blog a little under 2 years ago without any particular agenda other than talking about open source, my life in general and how it all fits together. I have to confess it was my first ever blogging experience and yeah I know I was very late to the game but things have grown and changed a lot since then. It’s become soley about open source and not a personal blog in the traditional sense, I’m fine with that. In the last 2 years I’ve managed to do some amazing things, most of them completely unexpected. The Linux Outlaws podcast started on a whim and became popular which was all a fabulous accident but has allowed me to meet and chat some real open source celebrities, the kind of people I’d only previously read about. That’s a massive buzz obviously and I still have to pinch myself often. Sometime towards the end of 2007 I also started writing pretty long reviews of Linux distributions as I hopped around and tried different things. For some reason people seemed to like them and soon I was being listed on Distrowatch, Tuxmachines and countless other places, I’ve been really lucky. That in turn led to offers of paid writing work which I have loved and been very privileged to do.

Recently though someone pointed out to me that I’m writing about open source and posting on a closed source platform in Blogger. This came as something of a shock but it’s true. I hadn’t even thought about it, the blog just grew organically but now I figure it’s time to move it to WordPress and self host. I already own the domain adventuresinopensource.com and at the moment it just points here. So I can setup a site on my own web server and relaunch this blog for 2009 quite easily. I want to make a nice custom design and do this blogging thing seriously, not in my writing style, I don’t think I could be serious for that long but in general principle. Get down to more regular reviews, updates, opinion pieces, maybe interviews, videos and so on, who knows. I’d also like to design a decent logo for Adventures In Open Source and make a bit of a brand out of it, as much as I hate that term and marketing in general I think it’s time. I’m not great with graphic design so I may be calling on friends to help with that but shhhh 😉

So that’s the plan in the next few weeks, there’ll be some major changes here I hope. It may take a while to achieve all this and I’ll keep the blog going here while I move. I’ll also redirect the Feedburner feed and direct people to the new domain so I hope there will be no distuption in service. Blogger has served me well and I’ve been happy with it but I think an open source platform like WordPress is more appropriate for a site of this kind.

I just wanted to let you all know about the plan and see what you thought, maybe you have ideas on what the site should be be like or what you’d like to see. If you have any comments, criticisms or words of wisdom please feel free to post them in the comments. 2009 is gonna be an interesting year I hope. Thanks to everyone who has read this blog in the past and continues to do so, I’m really grateful to you all 🙂

Sounds like a good idea, I’d say. I am personally more into Drupal, but I use WP for some of my sites – including the family site. My wife likes the easy editing, even if it has been a bit puzzling with the changes to the backend.I’ll probably convert literatelifestyle.net and technographer.net to Drupal 6 sites before long.

I love Drupal and I know it can do the blog stuff without any trouble. I use it for many sites, mainly with the audio module for podcasts, great software. I usually prefer WordPress for throwing up a quick blog though, it’s more focused on blogging, simple and I much prefer the automatic upgrade system. Drupal isn’t that hard to upgrade but it involves a bit more work uploading the files and so on. Any small amount of time saved can be valuable for me with so many sites to manage. Thanks for the encouragement 🙂